Yamamoto Family Residence Main Gate and Fence

The One Part of the House Built to Be Seen from the Street

The Front Gate and Walls of the Yamamoto Residence (山本家住宅正門及び塀, Yamamoto-ke Jūtaku Seimon oyobi Hei) run along the south frontage of a private plot in Sanchōchō, Kamigyō Ward, Kyoto City, built around 1940 and entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 15 May 2007. The gate has an opening of 1.8 metres and the walls extend 19 metres, both in timber under tile.

The house behind them, known as Jinpūan (仁風庵), is closed to the public and has been for the eight decades a family has lived in it. This gate group is therefore the part of the property most visitors will ever meet, and it happens to be the part that was designed for exactly that encounter.

Kyoto City's record of the property notes that the front gate was placed on the south face of the corner site. The plot sits where a lane meets Nakadachiuri Street, roughly five minutes' walk west of the Nakadachiuri Gate of Kyoto Imperial Palace Park. Yamamoto Jinzaburō, a wholesaler of undyed silk cloth who had moved his base to Kyoto in 1920, built the residence to receive customers and business associates at a remove from his shop on Muromachi Street. The face he gave the place was this one.

Registered for What It Does to the Street

Registered Tangible Cultural Property is the lighter of Japan's two architectural heritage frameworks. Created in 1996, it requires an owner to notify the authorities before altering a building rather than to apply for permission, and it takes in the Meiji, Taishō and early Shōwa buildings that designation as an Important Cultural Property had mostly passed by. A gate and a garden wall would have had almost no chance under the older system. Under this one they carry a national status.

The criterion applied here was contribution to the historic landscape of the nation. The Agency for Cultural Affairs summary states the point plainly: the group forms a composed and settled frontage to the site. That is an assessment of an effect on a street, not of a structure in isolation, and it is the same criterion used for the service gate group and the storehouse on the same plot. Only the main house went in under the separate criterion for design.

Kyoto City has separately designated the property a Landscape Important Building and, on citizens' nomination, certified it among the "Buildings and Gardens that Colour Kyoto." Three overlapping instruments, and all three are aimed at least partly at what a passer-by sees.

The registration number is 26-0240, fifty-fourth round.

What to Look At, Standing on the Pavement

The gate itself measures one bay across, timber-framed, gabled and roofed in pan tiles. Set into it is a pair of lattice doors that slide apart in opposite directions, a ryōbiki kōshido. Short flanking walls, sodekabe, brace it on each side, and beyond them tall walls run east and west across the front of the plot.

Those tall walls repay attention. The zone above the wooden base boarding is finished in the middle coat of the plasterwork rather than a smooth top coat, a treatment called nakanuri shiage. Left at that stage, the surface holds a matte, slightly grainy, earth-coloured skin. Plasterers use it deliberately when the aim is restraint. Along the top runs a capping of meita-gawara, battened tiles.

At the west end of the tall wall the composition changes character: a lower garden wall continues from there to the entrance porch of the main house. Follow the line with your eye and the sequence a guest would have walked becomes legible from outside the property, gate to garden wall to porch.

The southern garden lies behind this frontage, facing the Western reception room and the tea room. It is laid out in the manner of a tea path, and its maples show above and through the wall line; visitors in late autumn report the colour as the reason to come down this particular street. Cherry, in the larger dry garden further in, sits too deep to see from outside.

One detail rewards a slow walk: the base course, the plaster, the tiles and the lattice all sit within a narrow tonal range, greys and earth colours and unpainted wood. Nothing on this frontage announces that a merchant with money built it. The understatement is the design.

Practical Notes

There is nothing to book and nothing to pay. The Yamamoto Residence is a working private home, closed to the public, with no opening hours and no admission fee. The family opens the house a few times a year for a lecture or exhibition, announced individually and conducted in Japanese; Kyoto walking-tour operators occasionally arrange access. The gate is not a visitor entrance, so please do not ring the bell.

Viewing the gate and walls from the public street is unrestricted at any hour, and photography from the street is fine. Photographing through the gate or over the wall into the garden is not appropriate at a house where a family lives.

Access is about ten minutes on foot from Imadegawa Station on the Karasuma subway line, or five minutes from the Karasuma Ichijō bus stop. From Kyoto Imperial Palace Park, leave by the Nakadachiuri Gate on the west side and walk west for roughly five minutes.

To combine the walk with an interior, the former main building of the Kyoto Prefectural Office lies about ten minutes south at Shimodachiuri and Shinmachi. Built in brick in 1904 and designated an Important Cultural Property in December 2004, it is the oldest government building in Japan still in official use with its original form intact. The state chamber, former governor's office and former assembly hall are open free of charge Tuesday to Friday and on the first, third and fifth Saturdays, 10:00 to 17:00, excluding public holidays and the new year period.